2 Girls and a Cupcake Host a Pop-Up Retail Event Tonight to Celebrate Cupcake Wars Episode

The famous Free Weezy cupcakes

​Last week, we re-introduced you to Hialeah's only bespoke, hip-hop-loving cupcake company, 2 Girls and a Cupcake. The two namesake girls, 27-year-old Evelyn Dieppa and 26-year-old Lorena Castro, appear tonight on the Food Network's Cupcake Wars.

To celebrate, they're hosting a pop-up retail event at their Hialeah Gardens commercial kitchen alongside indie culture curator/online shop Phreshly Baked. Stop by any time between 4 and 8 p.m. tonight to enter a raffle for prizes, buy a new limited-edition "Real Men Eat Cupcakes" T-shirt, and, of course, scarf some sweets. The girls' episode airs tonight at 9 p.m., and for a primer leading up to it, read up after the jump.

2 Girls and a Cupcake pop-up shop. 4 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, January 25. 9805 NW 80th Ave., #R13, Hialeah. 786-285-8587; 2cupcakegirls.com

Two Girls and a Cupcake started out as a joke on MySpace comments about three years ago. "We had just gone to New York and fell in love with the cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery, and thought it would be cool to bring that kind of thing to Miami," says Dieppa. "So we just decided to send comments to our friends and see if they wanted to order. And that's what happened -- we had like, 30 orders for Valentine's Day. We had no recipe, no nothing!"

The crazy flavor combinations started early, and few flavors show up more than once. 
"We just throw things together, really. Whatever we have in the kitchen, we put it in. We'll be eating something, and we'll think, 'Wow, this would taste good in a cupcake,' and that's pretty much how it goes," says Dieppa. "We mix and match things and come up with new names for some combinations, but we never really repeat anything."

This has led to some flavor hits.... "You know how they have the pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks? I'm addicted to those. So I wondered if we could make a cupcake from one of those. So we made a pumpkin cake and added some white chocolate liqueur, and then a cuban coffee buttercream."

...and misses. "We tried this nacho cheese/beef jerky cupcake, I swear to you. It was pretty gross."

2 Girls are also pretty much the only cupcake purveyors in town to offer desserts with a hip-hop swagger. Local legends like Mayday!, Rick Ross, Pitbull, producers Cool and Dre, DJ Irie, and even Power 96 DJ Lucy Lopez have been immortalized in batter and buttercream.

"We're influenced a lot by music, because when we bake, it's us two, and our friends come over, and we just blast the radio, and we get inspired by that," Dieppa says. "Mayday! knows about their cupcake, and they and Cool and Dre helped us with our audition video for Cupcake Wars. We sent some of the Mr. 305 cupcakes to Pitbull through Dro from the305 -- we didn't get an answer, but we know he got them!"

The piece de resistance, however, was a special limited-edition Free Weezy fondant cupcake released shortly Lil Wayne was due out of Rikers Island. "I like Lil Wayne -- I'm more the hip-hopper one. So to make a cupcake of him before he got out of jail, we started working on fondant. That little fondant piece of his face took like, two hours to make -- everything from the eyebrows to the hair to the little tattoo on his face!" Dieppa recalls. "As a joke, we Twittered it, and then it came out on Funkmaster Flex's web site, and we got like 12 orders for it, and that's it, we couldn't take any more!"

Although the company's original downtown stores proved challenging, the girls plan to re-open their commercial kitchen for retail customers on the weekend. "It was intense. It was just the two of us working it, and we would be there from early in the morning baking until we closed the store at 6 p.m., and then from 6 p.m. on we had catering and wholesale orders, and we'd get home at midnight and start over again. So we decided just to focus on our catering and wholesale orders until we could expand and have a retail store again," Dieppa says.

"The place we have now is just a little spot, but we're going to open it on the weekend and have a couple flavors, and post on Facebook and Twitter, and whoever wants to come, they can pick them up. We would love to have a retail store again, or a cupcake truck -- that would be ideal."

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